Regina Dziergas
Photo of Regina Dziergas
Hello everyone!
My name is Regina Dziergas, and I am currently enrolled in the Library and Information Sciences masters’ program with a concentration in Cultural Heritage Informatics. I am originally from Syracuse, New York, spent time in Western New York while completing my undergraduate degree in psychology/musicology at SUNY Geneseo, and moved to Boston in the fall of 2020 to start graduate school at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts for my MA in Ethnomusicology. So far, my favorite course at Simmons has been LIS 438: Introduction to Archival Theory and Practice, and I’m looking forward to starting my 60-hour field experience through that course later this semester!
In my free time I like to collect books and vinyl records, practice flute and piano, bake bread, do yoga, hike, attend concerts, collect old cameras/shoot photography (primarily 35mm film), explore Boston, and spend time with my friends and family. I’ve also spent my last few years doing ethnographic ethnomusicological fieldwork in the greater Boston area, researching live performances, meeting and documenting the stories of local musicians/industry professionals/music fans, and working on my masters’ thesis on popular country music.
I’m currently in my first year at SLIS and am enjoying getting settled into the program, and am looking forward to sharing my perspective on life in Boston and graduate school with all of you!
Entries by Regina Dziergas
One of the best (and sometimes, the most intimidating!) parts of grad school is the opportunity to attend and present your work at conferences, held by the numerous academic/professional organizations that support our disciplines. Conferences give you the opportunity to hear about and learn from what academic research and on-the-job procedures and issues are being discussed, debated, reassessed, and worked on in your field, as well as grow your professional network by connecting with information professionals from many different corners of librarianship. I recently got to present at the New England Archivists’ Spring 2024 meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, and it was both an incredible learning experience and a great first step into this part of our field. The New England Archivists (NEA) are a organization representing the New England region’s archival community, and their 2024 Spring meeting brought together archivists, students in LIS programs, other informational professionals, and people focusing on other disciplines who work in archives or do related community programming to talk about their work. (Regional LIS organizations are a great way…
This last semester is a particularly difficult one for graduating students, as we apply for post-graduate employment, work part time-jobs, and manage conferences/networking all while finishing up the last of our coursework at SLIS. After nearly four (!) years of being in grad school between my previous program and my current MLIS, I’ve managed to get a pretty good idea of how to create and stick to a set, effective schedule that works for me. Even so, during this semester it’s taken a lot of hard work to find the right balance! Here are a few tips on time-management that I can offer as someone who’s currently working and searching for long-term employment while still in school.
Hi Sharks, I hope you’ve had a great start to the spring semester! As I face my last semester and the end of my time in grad school, I thought I’d share some insight into the process of searching for post-grad work. Leaving graduate school for full-time work is a tough transition, and finding a job is the hardest part of that transition, but I’ve found a few resources that have made my search a lot easier. First, the SLIS Jobline is a lifesaver for finding positions that look to recruit SLIS students or alumni. The Jobline (https://slis-jobline.simmons.edu) accepts postings from organizations who send in their job listings hoping to recruit from our SLIS community, and provides postings from a wide variety of organizations spanning all of the degrees and concentrations offered at SLIS. Listservs like Jobline are great resources to access these postings without having to track them down from individual organizations’ websites, and it’s incredibly useful to have a Simmons-run career platform specifically concentrated on positions in libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and…
I recently started updating my final project for LIS 488, commonly referred to as “Info Tech” here at SLIS, and got to thinking about how funny it is that my favorite class at Simmons has been the one that I was most afraid of! Out of the three required foundational classes in the SLIS curriculum, LIS 488-Technology for Information Professionals tends to be the class that most SLIS students are afraid of. On the surface SLIS is a community of wonderfully nerdy people, each of us with our own niche interests and skills that bring unique perspectives to every class we take, but not all of us are confident with a computer or have encountered these technologies before. Comfort with technology is also increasingly becoming a job requirement for librarians and information professionals, so it can feel like a big hurdle to jump over that arrives early in your time at SLIS. As someone coming into SLIS with a masters’ degree in ethnomusicology, my work hasnever involved writing code. I’ve conducted my own fieldwork projects,…
